The Virtues Of Being Creative In Education

Aditi Nadkarni's excellent essay here at Desicritics on the theme of job satisfaction and its positive correlation with choosing a career based on personal interests rather then merely its remuneration prospects stuck a chord with me. They not only reminded me of my own struggles with convincing others around me of this, but my own frustration with the higher secondary school education system in Pakistan, and its terse scope which provided with me little opportunities to expand on my interests. With a bit of exaggeration, I could well say the article ignited the hidden educationist within me.

Never a studious person in my life, I have always abhorred examinations despising them as a selective and arbitrary means of judging students’ collective creative, intellectual and academic capacities. "You work and work over a period of days and years, and it all boils down to how you perform in a single test that lasts a few hours!", how categorically unfair I protested, virtually throughout my childhood. So when I discovered recently that I'd need to give yet another exam in order to be considered eligible for admission in undergraudate programs in the US, I wasn't actually brimming with joy.

The SAT (formerly Scholastic Aptitude Test now just SAT Reasoning Test) for those unaware is a standardized test every university in the US requires you to get into college. Apparently it exists because university officials don't have the time to dwell over all your academic pursuits up until high school in a lot of depth. So they put a standard test for everyone everywhere, whose results appear to them as a single score, which they can conveniently give a perfunctory glance to and place you in a certain category of students. They also place significance on your high school GPA so its not all about the SAT, but it is nevertheless important. The bigger school you're applying to though, the more weightage the SAT carries (because the bigger schools because of the large volume of applications they receive have less time to review other aspects of your application).

Its a pragmatic way of choosing students based on merit I concede, but I'm just not a big fan of 'standardized' tests, or any tests for that matter. So when I learned I had to give this one more standardized exam, I immediately knew I would need some help if I didn't intend to embarrass my self yet again. Some one thereafter recommended The Princeton Review (TPR), an organiasation that claims to be the foremost guru at teaching you how to take pretty much every standardized test that exists (from the SAT, to the GRE, GMAT, LMAT, MCAT and who knows more). After some initial reservations (a single 5 week course for SAT I comes at the modest cost of Rs. 19,500) I registered at a course. Last week I finished that course. Its amazing how much my perspective has changed in these five weeks. Much of that is credit to TPR, which proved to be an institution super down on exam-related clichés and worn out teaching skills and super keen on creating innovative acronyms, portmanteau words and other tongue-in-cheek terminologies, characters and methods, all of which make learning a more fun and less humdrum experience.

‘Joe Blog’ was the one of the foremost amongst numerous such coinages that I begin to acquaint my self with. He (or she) is a fictional character that chooses the most obvious (yet wrong) answer choice. It’s not a derogatory name for a certain type of student taking the test but rather a more generalized terminology that addresses the intrinsic human tendency to initially think about the most common or apparent things. In that sense, there’s a Joe Blog in each and every one of us.

What’s the first word that comes to your mind when I say the word ‘black’? If you thought ‘white’, there you go, that’s the Joe Blog in you. In our class, when we did this exercise 10 out of 12 people responded with ‘white’. Sitting in my first class, I thought, how fascinating, I came here to learn how to excel on a test, and already, I’m learning so much more than just how to take a test; I’m also learning about human psychology side by side. It was only a small tool, less than a five minute exercise to be more precise, but in terms of generating an interest in my class, it made an instant impact.

SAT questions, we were next told, appear in increasing ‘Order of Difficulty’ or more conveniently ‘OOD’. Add a ‘P’ to the ‘ODD’ and you have another neologism: POOD or ‘Personal Order of Difficulty’. ODD is a standard yardstick. Permutation and Combination questions are harder then basic Algebra. But POOD varies from person to person. I like Geometry better then Arithmetic, but for you it may be the other way round.

The hardest questions came last and for these we’re told to automatically cross out any ‘Joe Blog Answers’. What is the most amount of pieces you can cut a doughnut into by drawing two straight lines? This is an actual SAT question believe it or not and since its question 19 in section with a total of 20 questions it is definitely an H or Hard (you have E for easy, and M for medium) on the OOD scale. 4 is a ‘Joe Blog Answer’ because it’s the first and most obvious thing that comes to your mind. So that’s out. You can close your eyes and mark that answer choice wrong. It’s that certain. Out of the 4 remaining answer choices, 3 are numerically less then 4, so logically, they’re all wrong too, and hence the only remaining answer choice, i.e. 6, is the correct answer! Viola, I thought at the back of my mind, that’s much easier then I anticipated it would be.

‘Joe Blog Answers’ are put in by the test makers ETS (in reality Educational Testing Service but more odiously described at TPR as the ‘Evil Testing Satans’) to deceive us. Yes, you’ve heard me right, those darned fellows, they’ll just do anything to confuse us. Wow, I thought to my self again, for once I’m attending a class where I’m being told the examination makers at helm don’t have my best interests at heart! They’re just here to bamboozle, perplex, hoodwink and trick me! (BTW, that synonym galore is a byproduct of yet another nifty tricky to improve on the arcane vocabulary tested on the SAT: learn up words in groups of synonyms we were told, how ingenious I thought once more, why did I never think of that?!)

Coming back to the deceptive intentions of ETS, finally I celebrated, after all these years, some one agrees with me. Tests aren't good. Test makers are even worse! With this revelation about the ETS’s ulterior motives, I now suddenly felt vindicated for not having studied 12 hours per day of school life like my geeky sisters did. My interest in class thereafter rose exponentially. For a person that’s driven to strive not by actual goals, but by sheer motivation, this was a significant milestone. The un-studious person inside me was now raging with passion; “You damned ETS, I’ll take your damned SAT and outdo it with such flying colours you’ll remember it for you entire life” I heard my inner self mumbling with ferocious ambition. As we progressed in the course I never did manage to complete as many questions in our class’s timed drills as some of the more Math-loving students, but I may have been the only person in our class to have always completed all my homework (which we were given plenty of). Not trying to talk my self up here, but just giving an example of how a simple thing like that helped motivate a potentially indifferent student like my self.

Sadly, this ability to generate interest for a subject in a student is not only a quality that is quite rare among the teaching fraternity but it’s also one that is hopelessly neglected. I was fortunate to have attended one of Karachi’s best, if not the best school, and also to have an instructor like Noori Rizvi at TPR, who not only excelled at this, but also regarded it as a priority. Most other teachers I’ve encountered outside of this sphere of my beloved alma meter and the TPR, tend to be concerned only with finishing their designated course, wiling away the allotted time class some how, and just delivering their lecture and leaving. Classes as a result end up as monotonous monologues which unless you’re one of the really nerdy types, you’re least interested in and the teacher too is least interested in removing your disinterest. This sort of dysfunctional student-teacher relationship in my view forms the very first foundations of a below average grade.

When I gave my first diagnostic test about five weeks ago, my aggregate score was 1500 out of 2400 (yes, yes, my Math is really that poor). In the last diagnostic I’ve received my scores for though, I've improved by nearly 300 points. I’ve got two more diagnostic tests to go before I take my final SAT from the Evil Testing Satans on October the 6th, and I feel confident about improving by a further 200 points at least. But I didn’t write this post to boast about my own accomplishments, neither did I write to singularly advertise for the TPR or even to laud my instructor, but because I wanted to appreciate the emphasis laid by these intuitions on the very basics of teachings, and for striving so much to employ new techniques to better achieving those basics, because sadly this has become an anomaly in the teaching profession in Karachi.

Out of school private tuitions are so commonplace now that they have acquired the status of an integral part of the academic culture. Long gone are the days where students would actually look down upon other students taking “extra” tuitions outside of school. Back in my days in school, we use to equate that with extraordinary weakness in a subject, so much so that you require extra help after school hours (and yet, mind you, I never took Math tuitions!). Now, in contrast, if you’re not taking tuitions for at least one subject, irrespective of whether you’re appearing for local HSC or SSC exams, or the Cambridge affiliated O and A-Level exams, you’ll be likely to be thought of as an utter fool.

One particularly shameless teacher I encountered in my stay at the state run PECHS College, where I graduated my Intermediate from, came to his first class and conveniently wrote his contact number on the black board. “Please contact me on this number for more information about tuitions” he declared with an amazing amount of nonchalance and promptly left class thereafter. As a person who in was used to being almost spoon fed by extremely dedicated teachers at the Mama School, I couldn’t quite believe what my eyes were seeing then, a teacher so openly advertising his private tuitions so as to not teach in class, something that he was being paid to do.

I wasn’t a big fan of Physics in any case, but the strong sense of indignation I felt at his cheap advertising gimmick meant that was the first and last time I took that teacher's class. That, apparently, mattered little, because from what my friends told me, he didn’t bother showing up for a lot of them in any case. Still, you can understand that happening at a state run educational institution, where there’s a general dearth of teachers of any kind, let alone good quality ones. And with the amount the government allots for education spending in budgets year after year, that’s hardly a surprise. But it’s slightly more perplexing why the tuition culture should be just as widespread in even private school students. That’s one enigma I’m still trying to solve.

In the meanwhile, I rejoice in the fact that all is not lost, that there are still devoted, committed, and professional people left within Karachi’s education system, who are genuinely concerned with imparting education to their students in the truest sense and not just making a living out of doing so. To all these institutions, to their teachers, and all the support staff in the background that makes this noble cause of education possible, well done! May the rest of Karachi follow your example!